And I need to correct a past repair on the front driver fender for it to fit perfectly

So overall, it's pretty decent. There is a couple of bubble starting to appear here and there, but nothing rotten. I should be able to get away with local repair and local paint blended with the original. That fact that it is blue, it has resisted fadding quite a lot and the paint still looks pretty decent.

...and you guys better get use to seeing the little teeny tiny 3K-C that's between the strut towers because I have no intensions of swapping it out

It has a front ADDCO sway bar....

...and a rear

Inside is pretty decent...

And I even carried my old steering wheel from my TE31. I also have a 3 mecanical gauge pod that fits like a glove in the original ashtray hole, so no puzzle with that!

What's worst with the car is the floor

I really believe that it wasn't worst that that before the repair... luckily, there is no rot or hole, but there is a lot of surface rust inside and out, so I'll need to take care of that fast before it really gets ugly. Both frame rail by the tranny need to be restored, but I have already done that to my old TE31... like they say : been there, done that... even got the t-shirt!

And there is little rust under the driver fender, on the support and the lower rad support is shot, but one again, nothing visible so it's a good thing for the paint.

The car currently has a 4 speed K40 tranny, but it came with a 5 speed K50... (nice difference next to the W40... and I'm not even talking about weight 49lbs vs 95lbs)

The problem is : the dude who sold me the car was probably unaware that cast alloy piece are not strong and if the holes are not aligned, it's not a good thing to torque the bolt to try to force it...

But it was in need of a rebuild, some of the bearing inside are a little noisy and the yoke bushing is not in good shape... so it'll probably turn out as my winter project!

Now for the plan on this thing...

First, the car is a non-runner because one of the front hub is shot and the bearing race are screwed (probably due to the last owner's failure to change bearing before they rip apart and take out everything with them. Luckily, I have a complet AE86 TRD front suspension that was supposed to go on my last project and never made it...

I have found a set of AE86 hub and steering knuckles since none of the KE stuff works... all that's missing is some RCA and I'll probably get a set of bushing adapters for the balljoint to be able to fit hte AE knuckles on the KE balljoint instead of trying to press a bigger balljoint in the KE LCA.

By doing that, I'll change the bolt pattern from 4x110 to 4x4.5... so I'll need to do something about the rear. The plan is to ditch the stock 5.7" or 6" rear for a 6.38" S diff... why?

Because I already have those (bearing, brakes and all)

That will upgrade my rear brakes from 8" to 9" drums to follow the front mod.

But their is one hell of a big reason why I didn't sale all of those things and bought back new bearing and brake for the small KE axle...

Yeah, that's a uber rare brand new in box TRD LSD for the 6.38" S diff... if I could find someone willing to trade a 6" TRD LSD for that one, I'd probably keep the KE diff and either redrill the axles to match the AE86 bolt pattern or locate some KE30 axles, but in reality, the 6" TRD LSD is probably as hard to find as the 6.38"...

So I ave also located an early S diff that I'll rebuild with all the piece above, I also have whiteline poly bushing to go with it and a pair of those

After all that is done, the plan is to fix the car's floor and other rust that's on it, including the frame rails... I've been through all of this on my TE31 so I have a pretty nice idea of what's to expect.

For the engine/tranny :

I'll start by fixing the K50's extension housing I have here and inspecting the tranny / rebuild what's out of specs.

So there is no plan to swap out the little mill form out of there. The rest is really really really unsure right now, but I'm starting to get some kind of a plan which is...

First, I have this mystery cam that came with the car

According to the interwebz, that code is for an aftermarket cam for an Opel CIH engine, ENEM is a scandinavian (or somewhere close) company that make those cam. But it's not an Opel CIH cam, definatly a toyota K cam so I'm thinking it must be a regrind following those specs which are :

Seat to seat dur 308°came lobe spacing 108°lift : 11.8mm (with the opel rocker arm ratio... I have no idea how it compares to the 3K)

I also have this...

4AGE silvertop intake manifold gathering dust in the basement for the last 5 or 6 years... along with a MS 1 or 2, can't remember...

So the plan might to put both in used on that little engine... milling the block and head and going a little oversize to achieve higher compression ratio. For the management, the plan is to KISS. I plan on using a stock distributor (or an electronic form a 4K) for spark timing and a fuel management with no feedback using the MS I already have : MAP, TPS, IAT, ECT. That's it. No idle stepper or IAC, I'll just modify the linkage so the stock choke cable cracks open the throttle to get a fast idle and I will adjust idle by using throttle stopper screw. I'll only need a little adapter manifold between the head and the throttles of the silvertop manifold. I'll ditch the stock lower manifold with vaccum ports, fuel rail and injectors in order to make some rooms (because there is not a lot between the engine and the strut tower. So I'll need use the ports that are on the throttle bodies for a vaccum signal and to run the vaccum advance on the dist... since the car has no power brake, the only other vaccum that I'll need is the PCV. Also, in order to keep things simple, I'll probably use a set of standoff injectors mounted in the velo stack. I'll have the luxury to mount them deep i the stacks because those 42mm TB are already way to big for the little engine so the injectors will not create to much restriction and that will be a little safer since the exhaust manifold is sitting right under there... but that will mean I can use a standard fuel rail form almost any 4 cyl DOHC car and just modify the mounting poits instead of having to fab one for the weird intake port spacing of the 3K and I'll save the hassle to make injector bung and mounting holes on my adapater manifold (made from scratch) and having to machine all this.

I think that's about it...

Feel free to post some feedback... oh and I don't care the the 3K is more suited as a boat anchor than a car engine... the engine/tranny combo weight the same as a 4AG long block and if I can get 100hp out of that thing, it'll be more than enough to get the "sub 800kg light as a coke bottle" shell some get up and go... it won't be fast, but it'll be fun... and should be nimble and nicely balanced.

Body will stay like that, without the rust lol : original Turquoise metallic with the valance and hood satin black and the TE grill that is already on it, the rest will stay as original as possible. It will also gain a rear 71-73 skinny bumper as soon as I find one not to far away and the wheels will have to be changed because of the change in bolt pattern... sadly, but I'll try to get something similair since they really go with the car well.

Light... 824kg (1817lbs) is what's written on my registration papers but that's accounting for the '74 massive "park bench" bumpers that must weight at least 30lbs each of not more... so it must hover under the 800kg mark (1764lbs). That's pretty light for a FR car if you ask me

As for a quick update, nothing has been done on the suspension yet but I have sourced all the parts I needed to complete the swap to AE86 front and 6.38" rear... I just need to get going on this. It will probably gain a few extra pound from this but hey, upgrading the brakes from the tiny 8inch solid disk and 8" drum to 9 1/4" vented disk and 9" drum should make quite a difference... and I'm not even talking about the TRD LSD

Light... 824kg (1817lbs) is what's written on my registration papers but that's accounting for the '74 massive "park bench" bumpers that must weight at least 30lbs each of not more... so it must hover under the 800kg mark (1764lbs). That's pretty light for a FR car if you ask me

Pretty light for ANY car if you ask me! Should be a screamer with anything torquier than a dwarf hamster powering it.

Wow, what a month! Honestly, I haven't been busy like that in a long time... I had almost no time to work on the peanut.

Since I am swapping a whole AE86 front suspension, I needed to find a way of bolting it down. Let me explain...

The KE lower strut bolt spacing is 80mm and the AE86 is 85 so I need some way of bolting my strut on some kind of knuckles. The AE86 knuckle wouldn't fit since the AE uses a bigger balljoint and the AE baljoint is too big to be pressed in the KE LCA. The LCA itself is 30mm longer on the KE so I'd have to modify a AE86 LCA for the front track to stay close to stock.

The easiest way was to get some AE86 knuckles with the 85mm lower bolt spacing and use an adapter bushing to fit over my small balljoint to bolt it on. The problem is that even power steering knuckles are a little longer than the stock KE20 knuckles so it makes up for slower steering... so I went that route since AE86 knuckles are readily available. Their is one other alternative : the TE27 uses the same length knuckles and has the same small balljoint as the KE but it has the same 85mm bolt spacing as the AE... but they are rare.

So after cleaning and painting AE86 PS knuckle, someone came to me with TE27 knuckle he found in a box in his garage... so I'll use those!

AE86 P/S in black, TE27 in grey..

Apart from that, all the front suspension has been painted. Calipers are back together, even the pads are in. Bearing have been pressed in the hubs along with the seals. Tomorrow I'll go grab some new bolts to throw everything back together... would've been stupid to mount all that nicely painted stock with rusted bolts. So I should be able to bolt everything back soon enough... maybe have slap eveything on the car this weekend... depending on the weather.

Then last sunday a member from a local forum dropped by on his way to Ottawa and dump his old TE21 rims with crappy tires. I didn't have anything 4x114.3 at home but now I can use those wheels to drop the car back on it's wheels after the suspension swap. That will give me some time to unmount tire on my Enkei and sell them to a fellow RX7 driver... so I can buy the 14x7 Watanabe from my friend.

Oh and the plans for the engine have changed! I bought a ski-doo engine from a friend for about the price of the gas it cost him to deliver it to me and the beer it cost to pull it out lol

:p

It's an old bluetop that the last owner wasn't able to blow even while beating on it sideways every week. I had the "chance" to follow him a couple of times lately and that thing smoked more than an old Skandic on his last stretch, it smells "2 stroke" like nothing! Cyl 1, 2 and 3 have 180psi but the forth is pushing a big 70... So I grabbed the whole swap, missing only a RWD waterpump, alternator, flywheel/clutch and a T50... but I have 3 sets of cams, 2 complete bigport head, and about enough pieces to build a second engine

So te plan is to rebuild it to OEM specs. Clean up the casting in the ports, polish the combustion chambers, deshroud the valves and balance the whole rotating assembly. So I'm waiting to open it up to find out if it'll stay 1587cc or if the cylinder walls are fubar and I'll have to go 1607 with 20over pistons. In an ideal world, it'll only need a hone and new rings, but we don't live in an ideal world...

The idea behind all this is to drop a stock bluetop that will make more power than the objectives I had for the 3K but that will make it with OEM Toyota reliability... and for 1/2 the price . I know, it's not original but at least it's not a F20, BEAMS or 20v... it still looks like and old crapy engine from an other era.

So that's it, the K50 rebuilder planned for this winter is out the window... replaced by a 4A rebuild!

Well for anyone who cares, Paul is the one who provided me with the TE27 steering knuckles!

Anyway, time for a little update while we're at it.

This morning was one of those grey saturday fall morning... so I decided to start stripping the little bluetop. First I only wanted to remove the wiring loom and label everything but as some of you guys might know, when a car enthousiast starts wrenching, nobody knows where it will end...

So it went for 2 more hours until the intake was out, all the timing and timing cover component were also out, the cams were removed from the head and I pulled the head off...

To start inspecting the block and to dig a little deeper on the compression problem on the forth cyl...

The head is in freackin great shape... it'll need a hell of a good clean, but everything is very neat. As stated above, I wasn't expecting burned valve and all the valves are in nice shape.

The first three cylinders are not so bad, the top of the cylinder is a little rough, but the honing marks are still clearly visible...

...but the forth is not so neat...

It looks a lot worst than it is, their is no vertical marks like you'd expect from a broken ring but those upper horinzontal marks are pretty wide... but luckily they are not very deep. I'll wait to pull the pistons first, but I might have to go overbore... which is sad because the pistons are in very nice shape too...

Stay tuned, I'll dig a little deeper in the short block as soon as I have a little time.

Concerning the rest of the car, the whole front AE86 suspension is back together, all painted up and assembled with new hardware. As soon as the weather improve a bit, I'll try to throw everything on the car.

Well, I went along with the short block tear down but didn't go very far...

I removed the crank pulley in about 30 sec with a flywheel puller but the damn timing belt sprocket was seized in rust pretty badly... badly enough that after 2h of heating with torch and quenching in penetrating oil and doing it again, I had to finaly remove the damn thing with cold chisel.. and a hell of a lot of elbow grease (and BFH apps)... here is what's left of the damn sprocket!

I don't really care for the sproket since I have a couple left overs but in my mad "striking the damn thing with a BFG" I dinged the crank a coupel of times, nothing serious and it's all in the aera under the sproketm so outside of the oil seal area, so no leakage should happen after this, but I still feel bad for beating the crap of the poor old engine like that...

Oh and on the bright side of things, I let the the #4 cyl soak in ATF for a week and after cleaning it out, my bore gauge can't even see a anything in diameter difference... hell my finder just barly catchs the marks on the #4 cyl wall.... so after aller, I can probably save it from goint overbore and reuse the stock piston (which are in pretty damn great shape)... I'll wait to see the look from underneat, but if it looks as decent as from the top, that'll be the plan.

Stay tuned for the next update which should happen after the whole bottom end tear down is over... if those damn gremlins stop shoving shit my way!

Well, I think that'll end up being the longest suspension swap in history...

I received my top plate yesterday and when I opened the box, I realized that they did not come with the upper spring perch (I assumed they came with since I didn't find a way to by those on rockauto...)

So I had to reuse the KE ones... but they needed some cleaning and painting. So I got as far as I could while the paint was drying...

Now I only need to take out the torque wrench and put some cutter pin in there... apart from that, the hub/disk are mounted on the spindle and the caliper and brackets are bolted on the struts. As soon as the paint dries on the spring perch, I'll slap those on with the coils and I'll only have 5 bolt per side to get all that back together on the car. Don't dispair... I'm getting there lol

Oh and by the way, the Energy Suspension polyurethane bushing that came with the car are complete crap... I'll take the rear leaf bushing dimension and order some whiteline ones and get myself a complete set for the front in order to replace those piece of shit... ES ones are going in the trash because that's the only place they belong. If you need some bushings, do yourself a favor and pay a little extra but DO NOT buy those crappy ones.

I'll only need to bring out the LCA once I get some quality bushing to press in there... the worst part of all was bolting the top plate on the strut tower. Was tighter than a virgin and the strut bar wasn't really helping out.

Everything is either new or rebuilded and freshly painted... I just need to refresh the undercoating so it doesn't look all ****ty. I think I'll use bedliner, after seeing what mythbusters could do witht that, I think it'll be up to the task

Oh yeah... upgrade?

But now the sad part...

The stock TE21 steelies look sad compared to the enkei... I'll need to take care of that soon! Oh and even if the coils are TRD 6kg lowering coils, the car didn't drop a mm, probably due to the fact that the AE86 front must weight a good 250lbs more, the coil must not compress enough... oh well, the 4A-GE weight should help in taking care of that issue

Oh and something strange but good came out of this, I went from something aroung 3° or positive camber to 0.5° or negative camber... and it's a hell of a lot stiffer in the front. Now for the wheels, I think I'll try to grab some 14 or 15" to fill the wheel gab instead of cutting the coils and slamming the car.

always've loved these models... looks like you are putting allot ov work in this -and it's looking good...

-cheers

Thx, I'm really trying to make something nice out of it!

Anyways, the rear end is out...

I'll be able to swap it out for a 6.38" in order to use my bearing/brake that I bought for the TE... and the TRD LSD

Oh and the leaf packs are out so I'll be able to dearch it and add one or two other leaf in there...

Stay tuned!

If someone is looking for 4 really nice 13x6 et+12 Enkei EK32 4x110, mine are for sale... don't fit the hub anymore and I don't want to bastardize those classic wheel. Just a hint, but I'll take the tire off and they will probably go in the FS section very soon

Well, here is the story of my T50... I traded it for the rear polyeurethane bushing I had bought for my TE to the guy that bought it. When I picked up the tranny, the guy wasn't home and it was pouring rain. The thing was wrapped in 3 plastic bags so it stayed dry but it wasn't the best deal. First, the damn thing was stuck in 1st... I told the guy that I would only trade with a tranny that turns without making awful noise and shift through all the gears. Obviously, the guy didn't care about that. Second, it was missing the yoke. I have a bunch of 20 spline for early T and 21 for W tranny, but no late 22 spline yokes... dammit again.

Well, I bit the bullet and started investigating if their was anything to do with the damn thing. I started removing the extension housing to see if it wasn't simply a case of misaligned shift linkage but the damn thing didn't want to cooperate one little bit...

Rotten bolt was seize to the extension housing and since I couldn't move the shifter's linkage, I couldn't even think about lifting the case out... out came the mig

After removing it, I was afraid to move the shift forks, I could with a hammer blow, but I was afraid that something was stuck on the gear selector side. So I opened it up and nothing. I had to use a brass punch and BFH'ed the damn 1st shift fork into neutral position. I ripped everything from the case and when I got to the damn rod, I realized what went wrong. Some water leaked through the top of the tranny where there is a little metal plate that hide the spring and ball that serve as locating pin in the shift forks for them to not pop out of gear. The water simply got on the shift fork rods and made them rust, which prevented the rod from sliding freely. I BFH'ed them out of there, lightly sanded the surface rust and polished them and now they slide like daddy in mommy. Problem solved!

Apart from that the tranny is prestine. Bearing are all good, no play and no noise. Gears are perfect and all synchro are more than acceptable. So as soon as the case in cleared from 25 years of dirt and crap, I'll slap everything back in there and call it a day!

Meanwhile, here is what my work table looks like

Other problem solved, I finaly swapped my diff with a local member here who builds mini legends. He was looking for a small Toy diff and gave my a very clean TE2X 8 bolt S type (6.38"), which has the same spring perch as mine and the same total width, which is almost 3" narrower than a AE86 housing. It came with axles retaining plate, bearing and seal in perfect condition (I had brand new ones, but I'll problably save them for somwhere down the line. I also got 2 whole set of 9" brakes, back plate and all the hardware, so I got more than a complete axle. And I also got a neat surprise. I was expecting a 4.1:1 two pinion diff from some automatic corolla (since they almost all uses that) but here is what I got:

9/37... 4.111:1, alright, we won't call home because of the gear ratio difference between that and a 10/41 4.1:1 but the 4.111 has less teeths which are a little bigger than it's little brother which makes it a little tougher

The only problem is I that I have no idea where this ratio comes from (maybe a late tercel 4x4 AL25, but I'm not even sure) so I'll try to take care of it... if that's even possible

So while I was chatting with the guy, I told him the "tranny story" and he reached and grab a yoke and told me that he thought it came from a manual AE86 but he had no use for it...

right on! An other piece of the puzzle found

Lastly, I took advantage of this morning's sun to work on the car a little, prepare it for winter. I removed the seats so somewhere in january or febuary, when it'll be -40° outside, I'll just have to open the car's door and BFH the hell out of the floor for a minute. Should easily take care of the sound deadening and is cheaper than dry ice

While at it, I took a couple pictures of the half-stripped car interior

And I also took a picture of the area behind the rear seat to compare it to the TE31's

TE31

KE20

The gas tank looks a lot smaller on the E2X, although I have no idea if it's a KE/TE difference. Overall, I like the frame layout of the E2X over the E3X. It's a lot cleaner, it looks a lot boxier and the shocks are mounted upright instead of being put at a silly angle under the gas tank